[slime-devel] Re: SLIME+Allegro on Windows

[Peter Seibel]

Stephen Compall <s11 at member.fsf.org> writes:

> On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 10:06 -0800, Peter Seibel wrote:
>> a console app. But why the need to use inferior-lisp--SLIME
>> communicates the port via a temp file, right. Is there some other
>> communication that happens via the *inferior-lisp* channel?
>
> Yes -- SLIME uses the inferior-lisp pty to send a form containing
> (load "path/to/swank-loader.lisp").

So, don't most (all?) Lisp's have some way to accept the name of a
file to load as a command line argument? I understand that in the
early days it was good to just use the *inferior-lisp* machinary
because it was there and, when SLIME was in early development, it gave
you a way to talk to Lisp when all else failed. Maybe the time has
come to break free of the *inferior-lisp* legacy? Assuming I figure
out a clean way to have SLIME pass the file-to-load-on-startup info to
the spawned Lisp, is there anything else that would be lost by
abandoning *inferior-lisp*?

I ask because it would be nice for me, as maintainer of Lispbox, if
SLIME worked the same on all the OS/implementation combos--at the
moment, the Allegro on Windows has to be handled different. It's also
a bit irksome that the Windows workarounds folks suggest require
hard-wiring the port.

-Peter

-- 
Peter Seibel           * peter at gigamonkeys.com
Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/
Practical Common Lisp  * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/